When it comes to Magical Girl franchises, Nanoha is one of the big ones. Possibly not on the uppermost tier (it’s hard to say anything stands on the same level as Sailor Moon), but it’s both quite large, in terms of the amount of content that’s part of the franchise, and highly recognizable. Despite this, I didn’t address Nanoha in my first Magical Girl May block of reviews, and while I’m no longer focusing the month of May on historical retrospectives of the genre, I did feel somewhat remiss in that I didn’t say anything about Nanoha.
Well, if the best time to tackle this thing was the first time around, the second-best time is right now, so that’s what we’ll be doing, looking at the very first season of Lyrical Nanoha, the one that started it all for the sprawling Nanoha franchise.
The show starts with a mage boy, Yuuno, losing a magic duel. He escapes by taking the form of a cute mascot critter, but trouble is brewing in suburban Japan. Said wounded ferret is then picked up by Nanoha, an ordinary third grade student, who takes him to the vet. Later, she receives a telepathic call from Yuuno and, on her arrival, is granted his transforming magic staff, Raising Heart, which she can use to fight off the monster that’s attacking, thus beginning her role as a magical girl.
After this incident, Yuuno is able to explain: a number of magic artifacts called Jewel Seeds have been scattered in the general area, which Nanoha now has to find and seal away, since they can manifest twisted monsters should they become active, making them a threat to the peace of the world. Thus, Nanoha has to be on the lookout for monsters to defeat with her magic and return to inanimate artifact status. Haven’t heard that one before.
All is not perfectly well, though, as a rival soon appears, looking to acquire the same magical artifacts. This rival is a girl named Fate Testarossa, who along with her dog shapeshifter familiar Arf is determined to acquire the Jewel Seeds for her mother, Precia Testarossa. Nanoha races her rival to acquire the Jewel Seeds, since whoever manages to finishing blow earns the right of sealing and claiming the seed, and though Fate is quite aloof or even hostile, Nanoha can’t help but feel like she wants to understand her rival and possibly become friends. Again, haven’t heard that one before.
Eventually, as Fate and Nanoha scramble for a Jewel Seed, a new challenger arrives, in the form of an enforcer from the Time-Space Administration Bureau, a group of transdimensional cops who tool around in their world-hopping spaceship. They recognize Fate’s mother as a notorious criminal, and want to make sure the Jewel Seeds are safely sealed while taking Fate and her mother into custody. Now that’s one I actually haven’t heard before!
Unlike a lot of Magical Girl shows where magic is magic and cuteness reigns supreme, Lyrical Nanoha has a… different take on its magic and its universe. Right from the start we get the idea with Raising Heart that Nanoha’s magic is more like sufficiently advanced technology, since her staff speaks with a somewhat robotic voice and does mechanical transformations as much as mystical ones. Even Nanoha’s Magical Girl outfit is subject to this. It’s still a dress in shape, but it incorporates a lot of armor-like or at least martial designs fit for a combat technomancer. When Nanoha is firing energy blasts off, it blurs the line between a spell and a phaser, so that while the setting doesn’t run on the physics we people of Earth understand, you’re not entirely sure whether it’s traditionally mystical, more technological, a blend of the two, or sometimes one and sometimes the other.
This is a space that’s very open to play with, and it does give Lyrical Nanoha it’s own look, feel, and identity, especially once the Administration Bureau shows up with their (dimensional) transporters and sleek science-looking ship hanging out in the void between worlds.
Also of note is Precia Testarossa. Thinking of other magical girl shows with the same pattern I was calling out earlier (of which I’ve reviewed Cardcaptor Sakura and, recently, Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya), they don’t tend to have an outright villain. The cards, or Jewel Seeds for Nanoha, are enough trouble without someone being actively nasty and antagonizing folks. Sometimes someone might make some trouble, but by in large they’re not doing the heaviest plot lifting. Precia Testarossa, however, is absolutely a villain. Not only does she borrow the “evil dark magic lady” look and feel of a Sailor Moon villain, she’s also about as nice a person. She’s clearly inflicted vast sums of psychological torment on poor unloved Fate, who wants nothing more than mom’s recognition but instead receives a literal whipping in return for not getting all the Jewel Seeds her first time out.
Frankly, Precia is just kind of sick, and I don’t mean that in the sense of “mentally ill and not culpable for her actions”, I mean it in the sense of “twisted so far from being a decent person that it’s just kind of disgusting”. Which, for your main villain, is not necessarily a bad thing. As a writer, you often want a hate sink sort of villain. So, for Precia, mission accomplished. This is somewhat acknowledged in character as even Arf, a creature that is theoretically purely subject to Precia, becomes disgusted by her treatment of Fate, and sides with the daughter over the mother in the long run.
As Nanoha joins up with the Bureau to protect Earth from the Jewel Seed madness, Fate is driven to nab seeds as fast as she can, leading to her trying to do magic that is beyond even someone of her level (which is established to, like Nanoha, be fairly absurd) in order to dredge up the Jewel Seeds that fell in the ocean. Nanoha gets involved mostly to keep Fate from getting hurt, even though it means disrupting a Bureau plan to capture her, but this still doesn’t go very well for Fate since she’s got to face up to Precia again. This is where the abuse gets bad enough for Arf to outright attempt to stand up to Precia, which predictably ends with Arf defeated and cast aside by Precia. Arf subsequently escapes to Earth, and ends up cooperating with Nanoha, since Arf is loyal to Fate and only Nanoha seems to have Fate’s best interest in mind.
After Nanoha cleans up some of her real world stuff, talking with her family and friends, she decides to challenge Fate to a winner-take-all battle for the Jewel Seeds, hoping to be able to convince Fate to turn away from her path. Though Nanoha wins the battle, Precia appears, steals some of the Jewel Seeds, and ends up revealing her backstory and motivation.
Apparently, Fate isn’t “really” Precia’s daughter – she’s a magical clone that Precia made of her actual (deceased) daughter, Alicia, whose body she has preserved. Which doesn’t make any of Precia’s behavior any more excusable, but I digress. Precia sees the counterfeit (Fate) as a worthless mistake because she wasn’t as perfect as the rose-colored-glasses view of Alicia, but as far as Precia is concerned, all that is at an end. With the Jewel Seeds, Precia hopes to use a powerful magical ritual (which could rip reality apart, according to the Bureau folks) to locate and reach the lost world of Al-Hazard, which contains power that Precia could use to resurrect Alicia. She wanted all the Jewel Seeds to have the best possible chance of success, but since there are quite a few meddlers involved now, she’s just going to go with what she has.
This leads to the Time-Space Administration Bureau conducting a raid on Precia’s lair, with Nanoha and Fate at the head of the assault. For as ruthless and cold as Precia is, she does rather screw herself over by leaving people who could track her alive. Fate is, naturally, not doing too well mentally and wants another chance to talk with her mother, standing on her own rather than as a minion.
The massive battle over Precia’s fortress gives Fate the chance, but it doesn’t go so well. After Precia’s spell messes up, causing a dimensional storm that starts to tear her fortress demiplane apart, Fate tries to save her from falling into the void, and Precia basically spits in her face and tumbles into presumed oblivion with Alicia’s corpse, seemingly thinking even as she descends that she’ll somehow reach Al-Hazard.
That ends up basically being the end. The mess is cleaned up, the remaining jewel seeds (the ones that didn’t fall into oblivion with Precia) are all sealed, and Fate will stand trial for her crimes with the general expectation that she’ll get off for the reason that she was a brainwashed minor. Sure enough, Fate and Nanoha are able to meet again soon, and when they do it’s fully as friends.
So, that’s the short version of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. Missing from the abstract summary is a lot of time spent with Nanoha’s friends and family on Earth. While the normals locked out of the magical loop don’t really add much to the plot, they do strongly inform how Nanoha feels and what she does. Her relationships with others, more than the threat of the Jewel Seeds, is what drives the show, whether it’s making up with her friends, bonding with her family, or attempting to befriend Fate by beating the tar out of her with magic lasers. This sets up a strong contrast with Fate, who is fundamentally alone, being unwilling to accept the kindness of someone like Nanoha, unable to really heed Arf, and at the mercy of a mother to whom she is extremely loyal but who sees her as a disposable doll.
One of the reasons why this is important is that Fate is… kind of a jerk in most of her appearances. However, you’re able to forget that or willing to overlook it because there’s a basic, core pathos to her character, one that’s made more clear by doing the compare and contrast between Fate and Nanoha. She’s not the only character I’ve encountered where I remember liking them and then think back on their scenes to realize that they started out really miserable, but it’s not a common pivot to actually manage, so the writing gets some positive marks for that.
On the other hand, there’s a degree to which the construction of Nanoha herself isn’t as good. I have to compare her to Sakura Kinomoto, since they are extremely similar Magical Girls at their basic level and their shows have… not an identical emphasis on the family and friends aspect because Cardcaptor is a Slice of Life show to an extent that Lyrical Nanoha isn’t, but a similar enough one that they’re comparable. Sakura has a huge advantage, in terms of dealing with her bonds, that many of them either are insiders to the magical aspects of the world or eventually become magical insiders. Because of this, Sakura has a lot of people that she can talk to honestly, especially in the second half of the series. Nanoha, on the other hand, has all her bonds kept in the dark, and is thus largely stuck with Yuuno as her primary contact despite the emphasis given to the mundane ones.
Further, I think there’s a difference between Nanoha and Sakura in that… Sakura is written more like an actual kid and her family and friends more like people, while Nanoha and her family are written more saintly – her friends less so, but there’s still an impact. In Cardcaptor, Sakura fights with her big brother, and he teases her; it’s the way loving siblings fight and tease, but there’s still a nice note that people aren’t infinitely sweet, innocent, and supporting. Tomoyo is always on Sakura’s side, but she’s also clearly a little touched in the head. Kero does want the best for her, but he can be a demanding little jerk at times, too. Her father tries, but he can’t always be around as an only parent. They’re a good family and circle, but you feel like you could actually meet people like them, which serves to make the characters more human and their struggles more relatable. In Nanoha, the family especially is either too nice for that, or not explored deeply enough to fully see their humanity, which cheapens some of what Nanoha has in bonding with them.
There’s a key scene late in Lyrical Nanoha, where Nanoha (though concealing everything supernatural about it) comes clean to her mom that she has an important job, wants to help a friend, and wants permission in order to be away from home to do this thing that only she can do and achieve her goals. There’s a similar, though much shorter scene in Puella Magi Madoka Magica (I realize I’ve been talking about Cardcaptor up until now, but bear with this) where Madoka wants to go out into the “storm” in order to fight Walpurgisnacht and save Homura, only to be caught by her mother, forcing her to explain herself without mentioning any of the supernatural stuff and get her mom’s permission to leave even though it would be against common sense.
In Madoka Magica, Madoka’s mother is pretty cool, but she’s also a flawed human, so there’s real drama when her daughter, who can’t tell the full story of why, pleads with her to be allowed some extra agency. You don’t know for sure that she’s going to take it, or what she’ll feel about the request, and though she ultimately lets Madoka go, she’s clearly conflicted about the whole situation. In Nanoha, you know Nanoha’s mother is going to be generically supportive, allow the strange request, and maybe provide Nanoha with some sage advice to take with her along her way, because she’s the perfect understanding mom. It’s a good deal cheaper.
However, while this is a bit of a problem with Nanoha and her family, she does at least butt heads with her friends from time to time. The crowd there feels real, and that does help when Nanoha wants to befriend Fate as well, because we know Nanoha can be forceful and because her early interactions with Fate don’t go perfectly smoothly.
Despite this, I do think Nanoha is a less well-studied character than Sakura, and not just because she has a small fraction of the episodes to get development in, but rather because she’s crafted as more of an ideal. It’s a choice that saps away a lot of what could have been memorable and unique interactions, replacing them with standard and predictable ones.
This doesn’t kill Lyrical Nanoha – far from it – but it does underscore the weakness that Nanoha never quite fits what it’s trying to do. Not perfectly. Mostly, it plays things too safe, which means that when it tries to reach, it ends up feeling like it stumbles.
When I reviewed Prisma Illya last week, I mentioned how it came together fairly admirably. Lyrical Nanoha stands at a midway point between Cardcaptor Sakura and Prisma Illya, and it’s kind of strained by the fact that it’s not really either. Prisma Illya takes place in the Nasauverse, which is as always a kind of insane, rotten, and violent place. The action, if sometimes overdosed, plays pretty well there. Cardcaptor ignores action almost entirely, and while it has a few good magical fight sequences, isn’t really about fancy arcane blasts and destruction. Nanoha wants to go all out with the firepower, and the animation sells it but the tone doesn’t.
Similarly, Precia literally whipping Fate bloody… kind of comes the hell out of nowhere. I did say that her being a Hate Sink villain is good, but that doesn’t mean that her hate-worthy move wasn’t a bit beyond the pale of what we’d expect from Lyrical Nanoha. It was horrifying, as it was meant to be, but it was also jarring in a way that it probably wasn’t meant to be.
Now, there is a Magical Girl series, and a good one at that, that seems to inhabit the same space as Lyrical Nanoha when it comes to violence and darkness – Sailor Moon. Both Sailor Moon and Lyrical Nanoha want to look big and flashy on one side, and reward the heroine’s feelings more than raw combat prowess on the other (not that combat prowess doesn’t also go a way). However, Sailor Moon also feels big in a way that Lyrical Nanoha doesn’t. It’s theatrical, sweeping, even operatic, and thus we accept or even expect great gobs of melodrama with everything in the show. That’s not the case in Nanoha. Somebody taking the kind of punishment Fate takes here would fit right in with Sailor Moon, and we’d hate the villain doing it as much as we hate Precia Testarossa. In fact, Hotaru Tomoe (Sailor Saturn) has a pretty similarly tragic and tortured existence. She might not be burdened with demand, but she’s possessed, victimized, alone, and has a crazy evil parent, so that’s pretty much on track… and we feel for her, like we feel for Fate Testarossa, but she doesn’t feel out of place. Though, in one last defense of Nanoha as it is, at least this way is memorable, when the show as a whole struggles to do a whole lot that’s memorable or unique.
So, and I know this is probably going to ruffle some feathers, I’d rate Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha at a C+. It’s watchable, even fun, but it’s not something I would reach for when other, better magical girl shows, even ones with an extremely similar concept, exist to watch. I know it spawned a massive franchise, and I can see threads that would be nice to pick up on, what with the dimension hopping and techno-magic, but I’m not really left eager to see Nanoha again. Fate Testarossa, maybe; if there’s a good follow up on how she rebuilds her identity in the the absence of her mother, that’s a lot of meat for another season worth of show (alongside a main plot)… but the first season is both of them, and more Nanoha, and sifts out to a very much “take it or leave it” sort of existence that’s got some good notes to recommend it on (hence the plus) but is really more forgettable, safe, and standard than anything else.